Friday, August 1, 2014

Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns

Available in English for the first time, Hegel and the Freedom of
Moderns revives discussion of the major political and philosophical
tenets underlying contemporary liberalism through a revolutionary
interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s thought. Domenico Losurdo, one of the
world’s leading Hegelians, reveals that the philosopher was fully
engaged with the political controversies of his time. In so doing, he
shows how the issues addressed by Hegel in the nineteenth century
resonate with many of the central political concerns of today, among
them questions of community, nation, liberalism, and freedom. Based on
an examination of Hegel’s entire corpus—including manuscripts, lecture
notes, different versions of texts, and letters—Losurdo locates the
philosopher’s works within the historical contexts and political
situations in which they were composed.

Hegel and the Freedom of
Moderns persuasively argues that the tug of war between “conservative”
and “liberal” interpretations of Hegel has obscured and distorted the
most important aspects of his political thought. Losurdo unravels this
misleading dualism and provides an illuminating discussion of the
relation between Hegel’s political philosophy and the thinking of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. He also discusses Hegel’s ideas in relation
to the pertinent writings of other major figures of modern political
philosophy such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Edmund Burke, John
Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Popper, Norberto Bobbio, and
Friedrich Hayek.